Packing The Court

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The confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Barrett to the Supreme Court began on Monday.  If confirmed, Judge Barrett will become the first female justice of the Supreme Court to have school age children.

Amid the rancor leading up to these hearings the Democrats have threatened “packing the court” if she is confirmed.  Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has suggested Democrats would try to pack the court with liberal activist justices by increasing the number of justices.  Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said that all options are on the table if Barrett is confirmed.

“Pack the courts as soon as we get the chance,” tweeted Indiana University law professor Ian Samuel, the co-host of the popular Supreme Court podcast “First Mondays.”

Just what does this phrase “packing the court” mean?  The number of justices was set at nine by Congress in 1869.  “Packing the court” was coined by President Franklin D Roosevelt.  It was a slang term for the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937.  The bill proposed to reform the number of Supreme Court justices from 9 to a maximum of 15.  FDR wanted to do this so that more favorable rulings would emanate for his New Deal legislation.  In other words, FDR wanted a court that would be activist not one that ruled according to the Constitution.

Generally speaking, the public does not like it when Congress plays politics with the judicial branch of the government.  There was a groundswell of opposition back in 1937 and FDR dropped the plan.  Eventually justices retired and FDR got the court he wanted.

Despite numerous claims from the far left that packing the court is the only way to save democracy, neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris wants to go on record about this plan for redefining the court.  Joe Biden, who was not near a teleprompter when he said this, even went so far as indicate that the voters had no right to know what he thinks on the issue.

Biden probably should have taken a “lid” on this day.  Joe is getting testy on the question of court packing.  I am certain his team knows how bad this looks to the voters.  That is why one cannot find accurate coverage of this in the MSM.

In an earlier age (2005) Biden was against “court packing.”

BIDEN: “The president had enough members in his own party and the Senate to convict him, but members of the president’s own party stood up to their president, the Senate as an institution stood against the executive overreaching in his own party. The Senate again stood firm in ’37 in the court-packing attempt. This particular example, the Senate’s resolve is instructive to today’s debates, so let me describe in some detail. In the summer of ’37, Roosevelt had just come off of a landslide victory over Alf Landon. He had a Congress made up off of solid New Dealers, but the nine old men of the Court were thwarting his agenda. In this environment, Roosevelt — I remember this old adage about power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely — corrupted by power, in my view, unveiled his court-packing plan. He wanted to increase the number of justices to 15, allowing himself to nominate those additional judges. It took an act of courage on the part of his own party institutionally to stand up against this power grab.”

Today, with the idea that there might be a majority of justices who believe in the Constitution for the first time in 80+ years, the Democrats want to change the rules so they will not have to go back to actually passing legislation to effect change instead of relying on activist justices to do their work for them.

The AP, another PR arm of the Left, was quick to jump in and try to redefine what the Democrats were proposing.  “Packing the court” was transformed into “depoliticizing it.”  This is Orwellian in its very nature to turn politicizing the court which is what packing the court would be into de-politicizing it.

Others joined in trashing the very idea that the AP was promoting.

Hopefully the American public is awakening to the absolute evil that exists within the Democratic Party.  It is time for Americans to let them know who “We The People” are.